Africa Is a Country

East German-Africans

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

East German-Africans

By
Anakwa Dwamena

Including, it will come as no shock to any woman that Cairo is ranked the worst city for women in the world.

Image: United Nations. Via Flickr CC.

A big talking point last week has been the lack of media coverage given to the blast in Somalia and its victims. Less discussed has been the unsurprising role of Somalians the world over giving immediate support, especially young tech people. 

(2) Joseph Duo, a former fighter in Liberia’s civil wars is running for one of the 73 open legislature seats and is symbolic of the transformations the country have undergone in the past decades

(3) On the long walks to freedom beat, a sequel to Nelson Mandela’s popular book is out. Some early reviews are already in (like this one in the Guardian by Gillian Slovo, daughter of Mandela confidante, Joe Slovo), while the South African Eyewitness News published an extract on its website. It will be interesting to see his reflection on his years in power (he only served one term as president from 1994 to 1999 before retiring) at a time when eyes are especially trained on the happenings around South Africa’s executive branch, particularly its current leader, Jacob Zuma.

(4) Remembering the generation that fought empire in Uganda and Mozambique’s “East German Africans.”  

(5) It will come as no shock to any woman who has been there that Cairo is ranked the worst city for women, in the world. 

(6) Large-scale farming and agribusiness is being touted as a path forward in Africa, but there are still many concerns. Here is one example of displacements in Zambia.

(7) Labor costs in Africa is evidently “too high” for the continent to become the next China.

(8) Much has been made of Africans leapfrogging when it comes to tech access on the globe. This week, for instance, it was revealed that more than 2 million people have used Airbnb in Africa. Yet the fact that many of the new innovations have no anchor on the continent means that we don’t keep much of the money here.

(9) Thinking about home-cooked solutions, watch a Ted talk on how Africans can use traditional knowledge to make progress. 

(10) Finally, listen to Mwalimu, and future Nobel Prize Winner (we can dream) Ngugi Wa Thiongo, talk about Shakespeare’s impact on East African culture and literature. 

Further Reading

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.